


simmer

by renrub



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Rewrite, Episode: s12e22 Who We Are, Gen, POV Mary Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:55:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28842741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renrub/pseuds/renrub
Summary: For these few hours, she will be a good mother to Dean and Sam, and Dean won’t think about how this is only the third day John has been back home, and Mary won’t think about how she took easier to silver knives and pistols than raising her sons. She won’t think about her box of things in the attic, or about how she knows she can’t keep inventing cousins to visit whenever she has a newspaper clipping about strange deaths in her pocket.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Mary Winchester
Comments: 19
Kudos: 286





	simmer

The kitchen smells like the pie Mary put in the oven. She bought it last week when she bought groceries. The kids were at home with John, and when she’d pushed open the door and asked for help bringing everything in he’d said _In a minute, Mary_ , and kept watching some baseball game, Dean transfixed by his side. So she’d brought everything in, and had managed to put three cans of chili in the pantry before she heard Sam crying. So she’d tried again.

“John?”

“Yeah, I know,” he called back. 

She waited. Nothing happened. She gripped the counter so tightly her fingers turned white, and then she went upstairs to take care of their son. 

Sam is not an easy baby. Dean wasn’t easy either, but without fail he would quiet in her lap, which made her think, maybe. Maybe I can do this. But Sam is finicky, and it took her nearly an hour to get him calmed back to sleep.

When she went back downstairs, the groceries still weren’t put away. She snapped, _For fucks sakes, John_ , and Dean had torn his eyes away from the game they were still watching to stare at her. He had gotten up and scrambled her way, wrapping himself around her leg.

“I can help with groceries, mama. Eggs go in the fridge. Cans go in the pantry.”

She patted his back, still glaring at her husband.

“That’s okay, baby. You don’t have to.”

His next sentence tumbled out in a rush as he untangled himself from her, grabbing at her hand instead and insistently tugging her to the kitchen.

“I can do it. I can do it.”

John didn’t even look her way.

“He says he can do it, Mary.”

She had stood there, frozen, angry. She wanted to yell, but there was meat getting closer to spoiling in the kitchen. She let Dean walk her in there. He took everything out of the bags for her, and walked over to the fridge arms full to hand her things to put on the shelf he couldn’t reach. His eyes lit up when he saw the pie, and he asked if they could have it tonight could they have it right now. She smoothed his hair and told him _later, baby._

And now he’s swinging his legs in his chair. He’s forgotten that the afternoon they’d put up groceries that he’d slunk upstairs as soon as they were done, as soon as Mary had turned back to John. He’s thinking about pie and swings and slides, and Mary loves him. Mary can do it right this time. In this afternoon, in this space, Mary will play her role as many times as she needs to until she does it correctly. For these few hours, she will be a good mother to Dean and Sam, and Dean won’t think about how this is only the third day John has been back home, and Mary won’t think about how she took easier to silver knives and pistols than raising her sons. She won’t think about her box of things in the attic, or about how she knows she can’t keep inventing cousins to visit whenever she has a newspaper clipping about strange deaths in her pocket. 

She’s distantly aware of another voice, something that isn’t her own humming or Dean chattering about what they’ll see at the park. 

_I know it feels better in here. I know it feels safer._

If she tries a little harder, she can tune it out. She can do it. Just let her do it. 

_I need you to hear me. Look at me._

She gives Dean a quick hug, kisses the top of his head. 

“I’ll never let anything bad happen to you.”

No bad things, just for this afternoon. She can do that much. 

_I hate you._

For a moment, it’s hard to remember what she’s supposed to do next. But she remembers, like she’s supposed to. She goes to Sam’s room and looks at her baby. 

_You lied to me. You promised you’d keep me safe. And then you make a deal with Azazel. Yeah, it saved dad’s life, but guess what. You left us. Alone. Dad was just a shell._

She looks at her baby. She can’t do anything else. A man is in the room with her, staring at her.

“His perfect wife? Gone. Our perfect mom, the perfect family… gone. I had to be more than just a brother. I had to be a father and I had to be a mother, to keep him safe. And that wasn’t fair. And I couldn’t do it.”

The man steps into her line of vision and she turns away from him. She doesn’t want to see him. He shouldn’t be here. Not this afternoon, not when she’s doing everything right. 

“And you wanna know what that was like? They killed the girl he loved. He got possessed by Lucifer. They tortured him in Hell. And he lost his soul. His soul. All because of you. All of it was because of you.”

“I know.” 

Dean startles where he’s standing, and his mouth snaps shut.

“Who are you? You’re not my son. That boy in there is my son. That boy in there doesn’t _hate_ me. I can’t save you. And I’m sorry. I couldn’t save anyone. Not my mom, not my dad, not John, not you and Sam. Not me.”

She remembers weeks ago, _real_ weeks ago, when she’d mentioned John in passing and the angel nodded and called them soulmates. And she laughed, and said _Yeah, maybe,_ and he explained something about cupids and pathokinesis and a sigil burned into her heart. Dean had caught the tail end of that conversation and given the angel a panicked look that he then turned to Mary, and Mary gave him a tight smile in return before excusing herself.

She’s crying now, which she hates. She’s always done this. Frustration building into anger building into choking sobs which makes her feel weak. 

“But I tried, Dean. I tried to save my parents. I tried to save John. And I tried—I tried so hard to save you and Sam. And it all feels like my fault that I failed. It feels like my fault that I couldn’t even save myself.”

She laughs, something a little hysterical.

“But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that I wanted to save myself, it didn’t matter that I tried to, because no matter what I did, angels were going to make sure I met your father, and then they were going to brand me with Enochian to make sure I chose this life. Do you know what that feels like? I spent my whole life wanting to leave hunting, _choosing_ to leave hunting. Years of my life, all spent making sure that for the first time, I got to make my own decisions. And I find out the decisions I died to protect weren’t mine.”

Dean looks like he wants to say something, but Mary raises her voice before he has the chance.

“There was never a perfect family. Do you get that? There were children I didn’t know how to raise and a husband who would rather sleep on his friend’s couch than apologize to me. And I still died to protect that because it was all I had. I lived for this family. I died for this family. Don’t you dare.”

“I know it’s my fault. I know I should have done more, or done it differently, but I was nineteen. I was nineteen and my parents had just been murdered because they loved me. John had just been murdered because he loved me. And I could fix that. My parents were dead because of me, but I could make sure that John didn’t die for me too. That wasn’t nothing. Saving the only person in the world I loved was _not_ nothing, and I won’t apologize for it.”

She chances a look at Dean’s face. He’s crying. It strikes her that he’s doing it silently. Not big teary sobs, like her. Mouth clenched shut, sniffles he’s trying to pass off as regular breathing, and she realizes. This is Dean. This is her son. Anger drains out of her, and now she’s just tired, and tense, and still crying.

“I love you, but I don’t know you. I do know that I didn’t do right by you. That’s what I’m trying to do now.”

She gestures to the other room.

“I can be his mom. I couldn’t when I was alive. And I can’t now that I’m back. But I can do it today. I can make sure that nothing is my fault today.”

Dean wipes his eyes. Sniffles. 

“That,” he says, “is such a load of bullshit.”

Mary can’t speak. She takes a step back. The room, previously bathed in soft light that made it little fuzzy at the edges, sharpens.

“The only thing you’re doing in here is soothing your guilty conscience. You’re not helping me or Sam. You’re playing your greatest hits and pretending it counts for something. You could have been our mom. You could have acted like family instead of blowing us off to work with limey assholes.”

All of a sudden, her anger is back.

“It’s not bullshit. You’re forty. I’m not going to tuck you in.”

“I’m not asking you to tuck me in! I’m asking you to be here!”

“I don’t know how to do that! I barely knew how to do it when you were little, and now…”

Dean’s face crumples.

“But that’s not fair. You’re my mom.”

Mary closes the distance between them, takes his face in her hands. He doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t relax into her hold, either.

“I know it’s not fair. I’m sorry. I wish life had been fair to our family. I wish any of us got to be happy. I don’t know how to be a mom to you, but I know how to hunt. And I thought… I thought if I could help, if I could build a world where you weren’t a hunter anymore, you would be happy and you would be safe. And isn’t that what being a mom is? Making sure your kids can live better than you did?”

Dean puts his hand on top of hers, and he shakes his head.

“No, mom. Dad—dad did the whole greater good thing, and I hated it. I don’t care about the greater good. I care about my mom being around.”

“It’s different.” 

Mary feels slightly desperate.

“John took you hunting, but I was making sure—”

“It wasn’t different. Trust me. It feels the same way it did when dad paid for our room for two weeks and then took off.”

Everything aches. Neither of them are yelling anymore, but are instead talking in hushed tones.

“I don’t know how to be your mother. I missed everything. Sammy wasn’t even talking when I died, and now he’s grown up and gone off to college and gave everything up to be a hunter and all these other things, and I wasn’t there for any of it.”

“So don’t miss more of it. You don’t have to be our mom, but be around. Be family. Please.”

The room sharpens again. Dean screams, and then he’s gone and Mary is alone.

She calls out to him, but there’s no response. When she turns to face the crib, it’s empty. She runs to the kitchen. Empty. She calls for Dean again, and there’s still nothing. Wherever Dean is, he arrived screaming. Wherever Mary is, she can’t help him. She doesn’t know how she got here. She doesn’t know how to get out, but she knows she needs to. She can see the way things are fraying at the edges, now, how the corners of her vision are getting more and more indistinct. She focuses on that, on how the room is trying not to fall apart, which only makes the seams more jittery. The blur is getting blurrier, stretching to cover more of what she can see until she’s only left with a pinprick of sight that rapidly expands into the bunker. 

The first thing she sees is a dead body at her feet. She hears the sounds of fighting, and she sees Dean getting his ass kicked. Her hands are bound, but her dad taught her how to get out of binds like these when she was 13. Ketch is saying god knows what, and Mary is looking for a gun. 

The first shot is easy. So is the second one.

Dean heaves a sigh and collapses into a chair as soon as he’s sure it’s done. 

“Good timing there.”

“Yeah.”

He touches a cut on his face and winces.

“You’re hurt.”

He drops his hand and then laughs a little.

“Oh, I’ve had worse.”

Their eyes meet only briefly before they both look away. Dean clears his throat.

“So our pitstop on memory lane. You remember that?”

“I do.”

“You do. Okay, awesome.”

They’re both quiet after that. Dean is taking a necessary inventory of his wounds, but it doesn’t escape Mary’s notice that it gives him a convenient excuse to look away from her. She shifts awkwardly on her feet.

“I don’t know what you have in the fridge, but I’m feeling like pizza.”

At this, Dean looks up. 

“Pizza, sure. Onions and peppers for Sam, meat lovers for me, and then whatever you’ll eat.”

“Pineapple and mushroom.”

Dean laughs, then grimaces when that moves a bruise the wrong way.

“You know, I always tried to convince dad to buy that, and he always said it tasted like crap and just bought pepperoni and sausage instead.”

Mary gives him a small smile.

“That sounds like your dad.”

“Yeah. That was dad.”

The conversation grinds to a halt, and Mary does her best to steer it into safer territory.

“Three pizzas. That sounds like we’ll have enough for leftovers tomorrow.”

“Yep.”

“Hopefully that means neither of us will have to cook tomorrow night either.”

“Tomorrow night?”

Mary nods. 

“Tomorrow night. If you show me where you keep the sheets, I’ll put my room together. I don’t have a bag, so it won’t take me too long to get settled.”

Dean probably pulls something with how fast he stands up.

“Yeah! Yeah, we got a whole supply closet. I’ll show you.”

“I’m not going anywhere. You can get patched up first. We’ll get this cleaned up. Eat.”

It takes Dean a second, but he nods.

“Okay. I mean, if you’re not going anywhere. Okay. I’m gonna go raid the med kit. And then we’ll...”

“And then we’ll deal with it.”

Dean leaves the room, giving Mary one final glance as if he’s afraid she’s going to choose that exact moment to bolt up the stairs and out the door. She pretends not to notice. 

When he’s gone, she allows herself to wonder what the fuck she’s just tied herself to. She knows that Dean needs her there, and she suspects Sam wants the same thing, even if he insists on skirting the heavier topics that Dean has no problem fighting with her about. She doesn’t know what she wants. She’s been trying to figure it out since she came back. Hell, she’s been trying to figure it out since her dad took her on her first hunt, all those years ago. 

She knew what she didn't want. Growing up with hunters meant growing up seeing hunters die. She didn’t want that for her, or her friends, or her family. Spurning the entire thing was symbolic as much as tactical. And John seemed as far away from it as anyone. She’d brought it up to him casually, on one of their early dates. _My friend thinks she saw a ghost once._ And John had laughed into his coffee and shook his head and told her that her friend was crazy, before remembering to look slightly abashed when he asked if _she_ believed in all that. She had laughed and said no, and a couple of weeks later she decided he should meet her parents. A whirlwind romance, swept along by an angel who had branded them both.

But she remembers what it was like. The fights with John, how easy it was to get overwhelmed. She remembers how the times she felt at peace were few and far between. There were good nights, sometimes, where John would put on a record and smile and sway with her. Years later, those nights included Dean standing on her feet while she laughed. Other times, most times, it was her solitude she thought about. Weekends driving a few towns out to a story she'd seen in the news. The rhythm and ease of research, track, kill. 

She understood it more as she got older. Why her family did it, why her father did it. You learn it long enough and you're _good_ at it, and there was something undeniably satisfying about the shower to wash off the hunt, water hitting you and knowing you were the reason someone made it home. 

That doesn’t manage to quiet the reasons she left. A pleased buzz runs through her after every hunt, a high she’s familiar with. But the few contacts in the community she still had were lonely people, people with gruff voices who told her about the newest dropped comrade every time she got in touch. It was no life at all to have. She... she'd rather have her family. The family she chose, the family she built. Warts and all, even if it was scary in a completely different way. She hadn’t known what she was doing with them. It wasn’t engrained in her, the way hunting was. She had managed, because they were children, because they needed her to. But god, was it hard. God, does she spend those years wishing she had anything to choose between besides babies to take care of and monsters to kill.

It makes her feel things she can’t articulate that the choice was made for her. That in the end, she didn’t have to pick a favorite misery. Instead, the third option. A pain in her chest, her nails scrambling futilely against the ceiling. The way out. She died for her children, she was killed by a monster. She lost so much and fought so hard and she still died a hunter’s death, her children still grew up familiar with the stuff of nightmares and were expected to fight them. Even knowing that, she can’t bring herself to regret dying. She wishes that her sons could have known the life she wanted them to, and she has to believe she could have given it to them if she raised them. Of course she would change things if she could. But she can’t, and Dean wears his resentment for that failure of hers proudly on his sleeve.

She doesn't remember anything of heaven, but she wishes she does. It would make things easier. A sign of what she should do, because surely it's not either of these things. Surely it's not mothering, which still makes her feel panicky and out of place. Surely it's not hunting, which comes easily to her hands but fills her with a yearning for anything else besides the constant soreness and fear and blood. It wasn’t either of these things the first time around. How can it be one of them now? How could it be _both_ of them now?

She's not built for this world. She was dropped into it from somewhere else, but she wasn't built for there, either. It's possible she wasn't built for anywhere, that her best option was always to throw herself on a pyre to save her sons. To be remembered as someone warm and gentle and loving instead of whatever she actually was. She knows she can't say that to her child. She can't tell Dean that's why she struggled to look at him, or that she's going to continue to struggle to look at him. Eating from the same kitchen won’t make them family. Sitting at the same table won’t negate the fact that she’s a mother, but not a good one. How can she be? She doesn’t know them. But she died for them. That has to count. Please let it count.

She takes a breath, shaky and unhelpful. She picks up a piece of debris from the earlier fight, then hurls it across the room until it clatters back to the floor. She wants to cry, but instead she takes another shaky breath. She goes to find a broom.

**Author's Note:**

> i just finished s12 and the entire time i was thinking mary and dean deserve to scream at each other. this isn't screaming exactly but it's what came out when i started typing.


End file.
